Another Great idea from 4 creative and a meandering thought that i have attached to it

I think this ad should get all the media placement awards going (sorry I haven’t posted the picture directly. WordPress is being a bit of a mardy tit today).

Anyhoo, I like it because it’s clever, funny and ‘un-PC’, by which I mean that some oversensitive person could take offence at it and complain to Channel 4 (I assume this hasn’t happened yet).

But let’s take a look at that possibility of offence: dwarves are short, therefore the placement of an ad that might appeal to them on the lower part of a wall is an idea that makes sense. An overly sensitive person might say that 4C is patronising said dwarves and making a mockery of their diminished stature by placing an ad where only a very short person could read it. Further, they might say that no dwarf would really see this ad, and therefore the only point of it would be to give regular-sized humans a bit of a laugh at a dwarf’s expense.

But then what if the programme were about tall people and the ad placed at the top of a tree or tall building. Would that be a cause for complaint? Unlikely, because we generally think of additional height as a positive attribute. But isn’t the situation the same? I understand that we might find the small ad funny and the tall ad less so, but it’s simply acknowledging that dwarves are short, which they are. Whether we find that funny or not is up to us, and is entirely separate from the facts of dwarf stature.

Which gives me a chance to bore you with my theory about compensation for damages: if you say something bad about somebody that is not true, you are liable to pay them money for the damage you have caused to them. The extent of the damage is assessed and a financial equivalent decided upon by some random people. But why then, if I were to lie about you in such a way that might benefit your reputation should I not be able to charge you for the financial equivalent of the benefit gained?

You might say that without a system to curtail or disincentivise damage there would be nothing to stop people harming others for their own possibly questionable motives. But if I were to improve, for example, the sales of an album by lying about who wrote it, would that not be harming other artists whose albums would be left on the shelves in favour of the one I lied about?

Harder to measure, I suppose, but another example of focussing on the redress of negative rather than the remuneration of the positive.

Does any of that make sense? Possibly not.